Video Infrastructure with Matt McClure and Jon Dahl

Playing a video on the Internet seems simple. You press play, the video gets delivered, and boom–you are watching Game of Thrones, right?

It’s a bit more complicated. Unless you have built an application that involves video, you probably have not dealt with the world of codecs, bitrates, and streaming. Depending on the bandwidth between the user and the server, you might want to use different compression rates. Think about all of the different use cases–different connection speeds, device types, operating systems, video players, cloud providers. As a developer, you just want videos in your application to play quickly and reliably. But it takes a lot of engineering, monitoring, and re-engineering to get it right.

Matt McClure and Jon Dahl are the founders of Mux, a company that makes video infrastructure technologies. Previously they built Zencoder, a product for encoding and delivering video. This episode was a fascinating discussion of why building video products for the modern Internet is still so hard.

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